Residents want neighborhoods protected in redistricting plan

Even though the redistricting process is geared largely toward ensuring minority communities can elect candidates of their choosing, Monday’s hearing focused instead on residents’ concerns that the plan will slice off sections of neighborhoods that have long-standing ties to each other.

Much of the focus fell on the southeastern corner of the Hudson/Park Neighborhood — sections of Myrtle Avenue and Irving and Elm streets between Swan and Dove streets — which the plan would carve away from the 6th Ward and into the 7th Ward.

Dove Street resident and 6th Ward Democratic Leader Laura Castelli said the new configuration would leave that small section of Hudson Park just west of Empire State Plaza “geographically isolated” by sprawling Lincoln Park from the rest of the 7th Ward, which stretches from Delaware to New Scotland avenues.

In a city where people identify by neighborhood, not by political subdivision, those distinctions are important, said Hudson/Park Neighborhood Association President Richard Berkley.

The section of the Pine Hills that includes The College Saint Rose, which has been moved from the 10th Ward to the 13th, was also widely discussed.

It now falls to the council whether to make these requested changes or leave the map created by its independent redistricting commission untouched. There are also other changes that some council members want to see.

The commission’s map was pinned, in part, to a desire to keep the deviation of the populations in each ward from the ideal 6,524 as close to zero as possible to keep representation across the city as fair as possible. (The commission explains its thinking in this letter.)

No ward contemplated in the map deviates from the ideal more than 1.4 percent, even though up to 5 percent either way is allowed. The council will have to decide whether it wants to follow the commission’s decision to keep variations low. Allowing larger population variations could allow lawmakers to make some of the changes requested by citizens.

Another key decision the council will have to make is whether to split Census blocks, something the commission opted not to do in part because it would have had to have come up with legal justification for doing so in each case, a process that could have extended the already tedious four-month redistricting process.

And time of the essence. The lines need to be adopted as final in time for this year’s council elections. If the primary is in September, as usual, ballot petitioning begins in June. But before that happens, the county Board of Elections needs to have time to redraw the city’s 128 election districts.

Council President Pro Tempore Richard Conti said he was told by Democratic Elections Commissioner Matthew Clyne that the board would need the new lines by April 1. But Republican Commissioner Rachel Bledi, who attended Monday’s hearing, said the lines need to be complete by mid-February. (Talk about cutting it close, Albany County lawmakers didn’t vote on their new lines until late May 2011 last year.)

There’s also still an outside chance the state Legislature could move the primary up to June, which would accelerate the entire election schedule and mean that the Board of Elections needed the map “yesterday,” Bledi said.

No matter how you slice it, the council’s operations committee doesn’t have an unlimited amount of time to fret over these maps — and moving chunks of neighborhoods and splitting Census districts may open a can of worms lawmakers don’t have time to close.

There’s no date yet for when the operations committee will take up the map, but Conti said it will be as soon as possible.